Wednesday's Most Active Threads

Seven of yesterday's top 10 threads, including the top three were ones that I've already discussed and will skip today. That means that I will start with the fourth most active thread yesterday which was titled, "Off the waitlist at Duke - unsure what to do" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster says that her son who had previously committed to attend the University of Pennsylvania was just accepted off the waitlist by Duke University. She says that he will study math and statistics and asks if anyone has experience with the two schools. The number one thing that those responding emphasize is that the schools have very different atmospheres. The campuses and surrounding areas are very different from one another and, as a result, it is important to determine which is more appealing to her son. Many posters stress the importance of finding the right fit. In terms of academics, posters didn't  think that there was much to distinguish one school from the other. A poster who has a child at each school agreed that there is not much difference. Another poster similarly argued that little separates the two schools academically, but that same was true of most of the top 20 schools. As such, everything kept coming back to whether the original poster's son would prefer a large campus to a compact one,  an urban location to an isolated one, or a northern climate to a southern one. One problem with threads such as this in the college forum is that so many posters respond who might not have firsthand experience with either school, let alone both. Their responses tend to reflect their personal biases and priorities. For instance, many posters suggest Duke between the two universities simply because they prefer warm weather. Others are angry about Penn because of the recent demonstrations against Israel's war in Gaza. Several posters appear to base their judgement entirely on their opinion for or against the Ivy League. Over the years DCUM has managed to attract a large collection of strange posters. If nothing else, running this site has taught me that there is no limit to idiosyncrasies. One example was represented in this thread by a poster who wrote, "Duke. Many people confuse Penn with Penn State." This probably would not be notable, but therex is a poster who posts this in almost every thread dealing with Penn (I can't confirm that is this poster, but it is probable). To make things worse, multiple posters thought this was a legitimate point. I loved the response though, "Many confuse Duke with dukes of hazard." There is also always a poster who shows up to comment on the physical appearance of female students and has a strong personal preference for southern women. In this thread, such a poster, probably the same one as always, opined, "Duke has prettier women by some margin". Several posters claimed that despite the differences in atmosphere, Penn and Duke attract very similar students and more than one poster said that they knew of multiple couples made up of alumns from each school. So based on the logic of this thread, the original poster's son should go to Penn with the expectation that he will eventually marry a more attractive Duke graduate.

Next was a thread in the "Real Estate" forum titled, "‘Modern Farmhouse’ look is so boring and already looks dated". The original poster says that she is sick of "these white with black windows super cheaply constructed homes popping up" and that she prefers "the dark, moody colored Craftsman style new builds of 10 years ago". This is another topic on which I am not qualified to comment. I don't know what is meant by either "Modern Farmhouse" or "Craftsman style". My knowledge of housing architecture is limited to Colonial, in which I live, and Tudor, which from an ascetic point of view, I prefer. But apparently "Modern Farmhouse" homes are white, boxy, and have black trim around the windows. Many posters strongly object to the overuse of white. Other posters argue that Craftsman homes were equally constructed in cookie cutter fashion with similar materials. But the fact that Craftsman houses are available in many different colors is enough to make them preferable to several posters. Some posters had less of an issue with the color but rather what they considered the apparent cheapness of the materials used to construct the homes. I am not taking one side or another in this debate, but I did enjoy the terms used to describe Modern Farmhouse style. Such houses were called "ghost ships" and said to give off "Beetlejuice house vibes". Another poster referred to them as "stormtrooper houses". Nevertheless, Modern Farmhouse homes had their defenders. Some posters simply loved the style and enjoy white. Others thought that whatever shortcomings such homes may have can be corrected with a little paint and creative decor. Many posters had little patience for criticism of any style of house. One poster offered a very strong opinion that home ownership is a tremendous and laudable achievement and that anyone who has been able to purchase and maintain a home should be admired. Others asked why anyone cares about the design of someone else's home. More than one poster argued that there are very few actual custom homes and that, regardless of style, almost everyone is living in a house of one cookie cutter design or another. Some posters were very defensive about their home preferences and the thread even devolved into insults of "boomers", "Gen X", and "Gen-Z", all of whom were said to have personality defects of one sort or another. Personally I don't care about others' opinions of home styles and when several posters insulted Colonials of the sort in which I live, I didn't get angry. I just banned them (joking, I'm joking).

Yesterday's next most active thread was titled, "Can someone explain why some moms/parents", and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum. I am not a fan of this habit of starting a sentence in the title of a thread and then continuing it in the body of the post. It is not descriptive of what the thread is about and simply bugs me for other irrational reasons. At any rate, the original poster went on to say that what she wants explained is why some parents do not sign up to send in snacks or drinks to afterschool events. I have to say that I was a bit surprised by the responses to this post. Many posters were quite defensive about their refusal to sign up. I had thought that parents might simply have forgotten to sign up or overlooked the request. But, no, these posters said that they intentionally didn't agree to provide snacks. One poster said it was because her son didn't eat snacks. Several said it was simply because they didn't want to. They might be willing to make a financial contribution, but they were not willing to actually do any legwork themselves. Several posters don't sign up because they don't want junk food to be pushed on kids. That ignores that other parents will likely purchase the junk food. Those posters should have signed up and provided something healthy. One poster's response was "Lazy, cheap, checked out, don't care." It was not clear if the poster was describing herself or the parents who don't sign up. Many posters said that they volunteer for several other school activities such as chaperoning field trips or buying classroom supplies and don't feel obligated to purchase snacks as well. A very common reaction was to ask why the original poster explicitly mentioned moms but not dads. They felt that dads should have more responsibility for this as well. In addition, a number of posters thought that a better solution than asking parents to sign up was simply to require a "snack fee" at the beginning of the year and then order bulk snacks from Amazon or something similar. Some posters sought to turn attention away from those who don't sign up and onto parents they consider busybodies whose involvement in the school is more about themselves than actually offering assistance. One poster described such parents as "super-volunteer moms" and said many volunteer opportunties consist of little more than bored parents standing around pretending like they are helping.

All the rest of the top 10 most active threads are ones that I've already discussed. Rather than dig deeper for another thread, I'll take this opportunity to provide an update on DCUM generally. As many may remember, last Fall things were pretty dismal around here. Advertising revenue had dropped to a point where we were wondering whether it made sense to continue running the site. Two things occurred almost simultaneously that changed our fortunes remarkably. The first change happened without me actually knowing about it at the time. Google changed its algorithm to favor discussion sites. As a result, traffic to DCUM as a result of Google search results has increased significantly. Google gives periodic "rewards" for reaching benchmarks for impressions and clicks in Google search results. In January 2021 we received an award for reaching 500k clicks in a 28 day period. We did not receive any further awards until November 2023 when we were awarded for receiving 600k clicks. Over the following months we received a succession of awards for 700k, 800k, 900k, and then in March, 1 million clicks within 28 days. In the last 28 days, we have received 1.2 million clicks. This illustrates an absolutely mammoth growth in traffic from Google. Traffic to our site has similarly increased. Back in the Fall we were under 500k unique users in a 30 day period. Consistent with the increased traffic from Google, we saw an increase in the number of unique users. Currently, we are seeing over 1.1 million unique users within a 30 day period. The number of pages viewed by each poster has decreased over that time, reflecting the usage of users who follow a link from Google, read the resulting page, and then disappear. But some of these users stick around and over the past few weeks we have seen this trend reverse and the number of pages viewed per user is increasing. One somewhat unfortunate aspect of this is the revival of many old threads. Users find those old threads through Google and either don't know or don't care that they are old and revive them with new posts. I am thrilled about this change of fortunes that we have seen since the Fall, but cognizant that we may be one Google algorithm change away from returning to the bad old days.

The second change that occurred almost simultaneously with the algorithm change was our switch to working with Raptive for advertising. Previously I worked with a number of different advertising networks. This had the benefit of giving me considerable control over our advertising. But the downside was that it required a lot of work to maintain relationships and to administer the configuration. Moreover, ad networks are constantly changing and our experience with networks was often uneven. Raptive brings a host of professional expertise and relationships with a great many more ad networks. Most of the administrative burden has been taken off my shoulders. We have seen astounding increases in revenue and in March reached the highest monthly revenue level in the history of DCUM. The downside has been a spate of unwanted ads that often pop-up and takeover the entire screen. Frustratingly, I never experienced these ads myself and my ability to do anything about them was limited to informing Raptive. I think progress towards stopping these ads has been made in recent days, but that remains to be seen. This is all to day that the state of DCUM is good, if not perfect. But hopefully will continue on the upswing.